If you can stand one more creation museum-related tale...there is a
Creation Evidences Museum near the Paluxy River dinosaur tracks at Glen
Rose, Texas. It is run by a reverend and is notorious for having
everything misidentified (mammoth tooth identified as the ribcage of a
baby saber-tooth cat, etc.). There is a picture of Stephen J.
Gould posing near it in a Natural History article a few years ago.
Anyway, the rev showed up at the vertebrate paleo labs at the University
of Texas a few years ago with a fossil fish tooth he had found in the
dinosaur tracks area and made everybody's life miserable for the next few
months claiming that he had found the first confirmed human tooth in a
dinosaur track, which fits their chronology. He also said that we had
confirmed his identification, which we hadn't. UPI, AP, all the media
picked up his story but not our corrections. If you pick up the 51st
anniversary issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, March 1992, you
will find a short story called "The Dinosaur Season" which is loosely
based on our run-in with this guy. Some of us are VERY thinly disguised.
 
I guess what bothered me most about this, and bothers me about the
creation museum out here in my neck of the woods, is that the creation
museums don't feel obliged to play by our rules but want to be considered
as museums on the same level as those of us who do abide by the rules. I
never felt that, as a known quantity, I could visit the Texas museum
(last I heard, it was still in a trailer), but I should go check out the
California place for the sake of objectivity and report back to MUSEUM-L.
 
Has anyone considered putting together a list of your favorite weird
museums of all time?
 
Sally Shelton
Collections Conservation Specialist
San Diego Natural HIstory Museum